The classical "great chain of being" as depicted in Didacus Valdes' "Retorica Christiana" in 1579.

Rose Eveleth has an interesting piece on the National Resource Defense Council’s OnEarth blog about zoos choosing to house only the cutest, “richest” animals and leaving the less appealing critters to their own devices. This is important, Eveleth says, because zoos often operate breeding programs where endangered animals can safely reproduce offspring, which can then be released back into the wild, thus increasing the species’ ultimate prospects for survival.

Eveleth calls on Daniel Frynta, an ecologist at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, to explain the concept:

(Editor's Note: Earthjustice attorneys Martin Wagner and Erika Rosenthal are blogging from the United Nations climate conference in Cancun, Mexico.)

Just before midnight last night at a stock-taking session here at the climate negotiations, applause broke out for the first time in a tense day. The Swedish delegate spoke not in the rarefied jargon of these talks, but from the heart as though talking to friends and family. He urged compromise and spoke of it as the key ingredient to a functioning family, country and, indeed, international community—especially when faced with the greatest challenge in history.

Compromise is a heavy lift in these negotiations, as it has been in efforts at home (in the U.S.) to pass a climate bill. But without it, the heavy toll climate change is already exacting in human lives, wildlife and ecosystems—witness this year's devastating floods in Pakistan, landslides in China and wildfires in Russia—will only increase.

At the heart of it all is compromise on how developed and developing nations will share the effort of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.

(Editor's Note: Earthjustice attorneys Martin Wagner and Erika Rosenthal are blogging from the United Nations climate conference in Cancun, Mexico. This is their first dispatch.)

It is with some urgency that my colleague Erika Rosenthal and I have come to Cancún to participate in the U.N. climate negotiations.

For the next two weeks, we will work with thousands of diplomats, scientists, activists and others to try to make progress toward an agreement to set the planet on a different path.

We'll draft proposals and counter-proposals in the strange lingo of climate change negotiations ("Should the UNFCCC's COP require the US to MRV its LULUCF commitments?"). We'll discuss the special concerns of countries as different as Norway and Zimbabwe. We'll strategize and re-strategize to address daily (or hourly) diplomatic changes. And we'll work with other nongovernmental organizations to bridge differences and develop solutions.

As if it weren't clear enough, the past year has shown that serious climate change is already upon us, and it's not pretty.

Bellavista open-pit mine, Costa Rica

In a bold and precedent-setting move, Costa Rica has prohibited all future open-pit metal mining! Environmentalists are celebrating the passage of the new law, which—approved unanimously by the Costa Rican Congress—establishes Costa Rica as a country that is "free from open-pit metal mining."

Costa Rica is the first country in the Americas to recognize the severity of the environmental and economic harms caused by open-pit mining, and to say no to future open pit mines.

Earthjustice and its partners are thrilled with this development, as we have been working for years to highlight the threats posed by mining in Costa Rica. Helping communities fighting the Bellavista and Crucitas mines, we have documented the failure of the government to comply with national and international laws for environmental protections, the inadequacy of government efforts to control mining impacts, and the need for much stricter regulation. The new law goes one step further and simply says no to all new open-pit mine projects.